Muhammad’s Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage. By Michael Muhammad Knight
Michael Muhammad Knight’s thought-provoking and compelling new book joins a growing literature using materiality and embodiment as lenses for the study of Islam. Like Adam Bursi’s work on relics and ritual and Travis Zadeh’s work on the physicality of the Qur’an, it uses early Islamic texts to acces...
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2021
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2021, Volume: 89, Issue: 2, Pages: 777-780 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Michael Muhammad Knight’s thought-provoking and compelling new book joins a growing literature using materiality and embodiment as lenses for the study of Islam. Like Adam Bursi’s work on relics and ritual and Travis Zadeh’s work on the physicality of the Qur’an, it uses early Islamic texts to access a world of substances, bodies, and the forces and contacts that are understood to bind them. The texts themselves are understood not simply as carriers of meaning, but (to adapt an image that Knight uses throughout the book) as flows through the nodes of a network that transmits power and blessing as much as it transmits ideas. Knight’s immediate subject is the body of the Prophet Muhammad, but his larger project addresses (and critiques) the religious and scholarly structures that seek to channel and capture—if only partially and provisionally—the power and holiness of the prophetic body. Its central organizing concept is baraka, a term that designates the contagious force of auspiciousness, fertility, and well-being inhering in sacred bodies and objects. Often relegated to ethnographic explorations of “folk” Islam, it is here approached as an integral element of the early textual tradition. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfab033 |